Artistic PRACTICE AS Research

In this blog post, I exercise thinking along with some key theories and concepts related to my research…
… and also do some meta-reflection on the methods of art and research on XR choreography.

Artistic research is a complex mesh, an intertwining of theory and practice. Doing research involves a lot of thinking and writing, but in my case, also artistic practice, the actual making of art, through which I generate knowledge on the practice of Digital Choreography, to make performative artworks with interactive technologies.
As my artistic work is mainly focused on real-time interactive environments, the work focuses on the lived, perceptual body. Therefore, the intellect of the sensing, thinking body is at the center of my research, as it is also in my artistic practice. I work with and do performance for the living, moving, acting, thinking, perceiving body. Therefore, much of the knowledge is sourced from the emerging embodied experience, the body entangled with the technological system.
Creating technological systems for the body to engage with is much about perceiving and observing what happens with and within the body, perceptually, affectively, and performatively, when interacting with the system. To create a performative piece for a body or multiple bodies to enact, is to think of the potentialities of the body and allow the sensorial, perceptual knowledge to guide the compositional process. A thinking-through-the-body in the act of choreographing to grasp the act of performing.
Working through my own body and with other bodies, intercorporeally and analytically, allows me to widen my conceptual and compositional horizon on the potentials of the performance. Therefore, a phenomenological method of attending to and analysing the embodied perception is as important as the computational system design and choreographic compositional practices.